


As I Lay Dying

by plsnskanks (orphan_account)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F, and a bit of violence, moira doesnt know how to let things go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-23 22:16:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16627433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/plsnskanks
Summary: In which Mercy has a foot in the grave and Moira has something to say about it.





	As I Lay Dying

She feels herself fading in and out like a radio signal on the verge of its range. After all this time, bringing others back from the precipice of death, holding the hands of those she could not, watching with an ache that never quiet went away as they passed away in her arms or her lap, their eyes either fading out staring up at the world, or closing a final time in resignation.

She herself is staring up into a grey sky that looks like it is about to break open in a heavy downpour and wash away everything from the scarred and pitted earth on which she rests. She can’t feel pain right now, which is how she knows it’s bad.

Angela’s life had always been wrought with pain. It dogged behind her footsteps lingering in her chest late at night as she was kept awake by old memories that time had failed to dull the edge of. She felt it in her arthritic hands which had ached worse as the days grew shorter. She knew pain. It lived with her.

She had felt pain a little bit ago. No. Not pain. Agony in its rawest form but soon that too passed as her body went into shock and she looked at her blurring, graying finger tips and pressed them to her side where the pain had been radiating from and they came away stickied in blood and she found that she could not be afraid.

She had, after all, been consumed, entrenched in death, merely by her choice in the line of work. She had known for a long while that death was the great and final equalizer and came regardless of age or readiness or social standing.

It was this knowledge that always pushed her to live as much in the moment as she could, to leave things on the battlefield to their final rest in her off hours, and to live among and love those she held dear as purely and sincerely as she could.

So here she is Angela Ziegler, dying free of regret at age 29, pale hair strewn out alongside her, fine golden streams of raw sunlight getting sullied in the mud as the sky breaks open at last and tear by tear drops down to mix with those on her face.

She is ready. She tells herself. She is old, too old. A life well lived feels long regardless of the actual temporal length because the meaning is what carries the most weight to the human psyche. So here she is, staring up at the old world feeling old herself, watching the clouds roll over her and rain down on her and she can feel herself fading out and her voice, which hours ago was crying hoarsely for help, for a savior, is whisper soft as she lets out the prayers she knows by rote from childhood.

“Angela? Oh my god, Angela,” A blurred shape appears in front of her and she cannot see through the rain in her eyes. The shape fills her vision and soft hands wipe the corners of her eyes.

“Moira?”

“It’s okay Ange, it’s gonna be okay,” even though she is the one reassuring her Moira’s voice quakes with tears that do not manifest themselves physically. “Oh god what happened.”

Angela wheezes out a raspy laugh, it sounds like the turning of a squeaky faucet, “Stray Omnic got me.”

Moira’s face crumbles under the effort of trying to hold back her emotions and she grasps Angela’s hands in hers.

“I can save you Ange, I can, I have experiments, trials in the lab that might,” Moira’s words are lost on her as she tries to focus on the thin lips emitting desperate denials of the solid fact that she is slipping away and Moira doesn’t know how to cope with it.

Forgetting that it is slicked in her own blood, Angela presses her dirtied hand to Moira’s face and looks at her kindly, with as much love and sincerity as she can muster. She draws on her emotions for the woman leaning over her. Every long night spent in the lab, every competitive spark that flickered between them, every lingering touch.

She smiles gently at her and it is with the softest and kindest intentions that she tells Moira the truth. She was never one to hold off putting disinfectant in a wound to set it healing faster and she won’t start now.

“I’m not even going to make it halfway,” She lets herself relax into the deepening mud. She realizes she should be feeling cold right now. Icy, frigid cold that reaches down to her very bones. But all she feels is a distant ache and a sense of peace sweeping over her. Someone, distantly is touching her, calling her name, but her eye lids had closed without her noticing it and without further thought, she is thrust into a dark void.

Initially in the void she feels as though she is floating, weightless and unheeded in a vast dark sea with no direction as to up or down, east or west. She merely feels the levity of being unburdened.

This levity slowly ebbs away as she feels herself being pulled one particularly way, slowly at first, inch by inch then soon picking up faster and faster until she is being hurled, terminal velocity, to where, she has no clue she can merely feel the force, the acceleration of her body and in the distance is a white circle which grows larger and larger and frays at the edges, encircling her entire field of view as she hurtles towards it.

Angela sits up with a desperate gasp, electrodes all over her naked body, aware only of the absolutely crushing wave of agony that hits her as her head feels like it is splitting in two under the harsh light of the overhead.

She looks down at her hands to see black veins writhing under her skin and she squeezes her eyes shut to draw herself away from the horror of the sight and attempt to maintain some shred of sanity in the face of this absolute mindfuck of a situation.

“Angela, oh my god, Angela, you are alive,” Hands wrap around her and press against her bare back, the prickle of long nails giving her an inkling as to who exactly is greeting her. Mercy pulls herself back from Moira, ripping out a few electrodes in the process.

She looks out into two differently colored eyes, her own wide blue ones staring back. Moira can see where blood vessels have ruptured in Angela’s eyes and maybe it is a little bit that and the dawning expression of horror on her face that has Moira looking at her in confusion and she hesitates to draw nearer.

“What did you do?” Angela says, whisper soft. Moira didn’t think she would have caught the question if she hadn’t been able to read it off Angela’s lips. She wants to touch her, because those expressions, those are Angela. 

But the way her eyes have dark spots of red, and the way her veins protrude wire like and dark from her skin… that is not Angela. That was her doing.

And knowing that fact ruins something a little bit for Moira. 

“From what?” Angela looks at her, face pleading, eyes like open wounds. “It was my time,” her voice breaks on the last syllable.

“It wasn’t,” Moira shouts back, emotion flooding her voice without restraint. She can’t help it because it is her deepest arrogance to believe that she alone was the one who could claw back things that were taken too soon.

“Ange, you are so young, don’t you want to grow old?” Moira says, entire face sagging under the weight of her own desperation trickling down over her features.

“All I want is peace,” Angela says softly, and Moira can see her there, framed by the unflattering harsh fluorescent light, but still radiating some sort of softness, some sort of tenderness that Moira would never be able to grasp the root of. 

How something so soft had managed to stay so long in such a hard world. As far as she had made it, it wasn’t far enough.

“There is no peace for the living,” Moira says in finality. Angela looks at her, silently, blotchy eyes staring at her, through her, unnerving her. As she leaves, flicking off the lights before she shuts the door, Moira hesitates. She throws one last glance over her shoulder, back at Angela.

Her dark figure is visible just barely by the light of the machines. She doesn’t move, just keeps looking at her. The dark veins of her hands trail out into the darkness of the room and suddenly Angela’s presence seems much bigger, much more connected to something else than just her body. Moira turns and shuts the door. She locks the door and quickly takes a few paces away from it, staring back at the solemn grey rectangle.

The key is put firmly in her pocket. She looks either way down the long corridor and all she sees is the empty blue-grey hallway, dim in the half light.

She turns and for reasons unknown to herself, she is sprinting by the time she has taken five steps away from the room. She doesn’t sleep as the rain outside pours on and on and on. Sleep doesn’t so much sneak up on her as the absence of reality does. 

She is in a dark room. She hears footsteps, soft, delicate, but there. A last touch to her face and something whispered in her ear. And then nothing for a long time.

When she wakes up and returns to the room, heart in her throat, her fingers quake as she reaches out to touch the doorknob. They tremor there, reflecting the internal jitters of her own emotions. Finally, she steels herself, ready to once again accept the reality that she herself had hand in creating. The room is empty, Angela is gone.


End file.
